by Ben Bova
I kept up a running commentary, for the record. If and when I got back to Hal and the others, they would morph his voice for mine and have a fine step-by-step narration of the first stroll on Venus. Ought to get a nice bonus out of it, even if it went to my heirs because I got fried to a crisp walking that walk.
Come to think of it, I didn’t have any heirs. No family at all. Orphan me. My family had been Hal and the guys we worked with. Including Angel, of course. Our crew was fully integrated. No biases allowed, none whatsoever.
It was hot. And getting hotter. After a while I started to feel a little dizzy, weak in the knees. Dehydration. At least I wasn’t sweating so much. But I knew if I didn’t drink some water and swallow a salt pill I’d be dead before long. Trouble was, every sip of water I drank meant less water for the suit’s cooling system. And there wasn’t a recycler in the suit; no room for it. Besides, I was only supposed to be on the surface for an hour or less.
“Anyway,” thoughtful Hal had told the safety engineers, “who wants to drink his own recycled piss and sweat?”
I wouldn’t mind, I thought. Not here and now.
On I walked, creeping closer to the return vehicle. I tried to go into a meditative state while I was walking, letting the servomotors’ wheezing and groaning lull me into a blankness so I could keep on moving automatically and let all this pain and discomfort slip out of my thoughts.
Didn’t work. The suit’s left leg was chafing against my crotch. Both my legs were tiring fast. My back itched. The air seemed to be getting stale; I started coughing. My vision was blurring, too.
And then the snake made a grab for me.
Venusian snakes have nothing to do with the kinds of snakes we have on Earth. They are feeding arms of underground creatures, big bulbous ugly sluglike things that live under the red-hot surface rocks. Don’t ask me how anything can live in temperatures four or five times hotter than boiling water. The scientists say they’re made of silicones and have molten sulfur for blood. All I saw was a set of their damned feeding arms—snakes.
There’s a basic human reaction to the sudden sight of a snake. Run away!
The snake suddenly popped up in front of me, slithering out of its hole. I hopped a meter and a half, even with the weight of the suit, stumbled, and fell flat on my back. Well, not flat on my back, there was too much equipment strapped onto me for that. But I hit the ground and all the air whooshed out of my lungs.
Faster than an eye blink three snakes wrapped themselves around me. I saw another two wavering in the air, standing up like quivering antennas.
“No metal!” I screamed, as if they could hear or understand. “No metal!”
That didn’t seem to bother them at all. They had latched onto me and they weren’t going to let go. Could they sense the metal beneath my suit’s plastic exterior? Could they burn their way through to it? Liquid sulfur would do the job pretty damned quick.
I couldn’t sit up, not with their greedy arms wrapped all over me. I grabbed one of the snakes and pried it off me. It took both hands and all the strength of my servo-aided muscles. The underside of the thing had long, narrow mouths, twitching open and closed constantly. Disgusting. There were some kind of filaments around the lips, too. Really loathsome.
Fighting an urge to barf, I bent the snake over backwards, trying to break it. No go. It was rubbery and flexible as a garden hose. Blazing hot anger boiled up in me, real fury. These brainless sonsofbitches were trying to kill me! I twisted it, pounded its end on the red-hot rock, fought one leg loose, and stomped on it with my boot.
It must have decided I wasn’t edible. Or maybe I was giving it more pain than it wanted. All of a sudden all the snakes let loose of me and snapped back into their holes as if they had springs attached to their other ends. Zip! and they were gone.
Shaking inside, I slowly got to my feet again. Some scientists have a theory that the snakes are all connected to one big, huge, underground organism. Or maybe there’s more than one, but they communicate with each other. Either way, once it—or they—decided I was too much trouble to deal with, I wasn’t bothered with ’em again.
But I didn’t know that. I staggered on toward the return vehicle, scared, battered, bone weary, and very, very hot.
And there was the old Russian craft, up ahead. At first I thought it was a mirage, but sure enough it was the spacecraft, sitting on a little rise in the ground like a forgotten old monument to past glory.
Maybe I was just too tired to care, but it looked very unimpressive to me. Not much more than a small round disc that had sagged and half-collapsed on one side to reveal the crumpled remains of a dull metal ball beneath it, sitting on those baking, red-hot rocks. It reminded me of an old-fashioned can of soda pop that had been crushed by some powerful hand.
I staggered over to it and touched the collapsed metal sphere. It crumbled into powder. Sitting there for more than a century in this heat, in an atmosphere loaded with corrosive sulfur and chlorine compounds, the metal had just turned to dust. Like the mummies in old horror shows. Nothing left but dust.
I walked slowly around it anyway, letting my helmet camera record a full three-sixty view. History. The first man-made object to make it to the surface of another planet.
Just like me. I was going to be history, too. I was baking inside my suit. The temperature readout was hitting fifty; damned near two hundred in the old Fahrenheit scale, and that was inside the suit. I was being broiled alive. If it weren’t for my monomolecular long johns my skin would’ve been blistering.
Plodding along. I left old Venera 5 behind me, following the beep-beep of the return ship’s beacon, hoping it was working okay and I was heading in the right direction. Can there be an electronic mirage? I mean, could I be wandering off into the oven-hot wilderness, chasing a signal that got warped somehow and is leading me away from the return vehicle?
Is there a return vehicle at all? I started to wonder. Maybe this is Hal’s way of getting rid of me. Get the competition out of the way. Then it’s him and Angel without any complications. No, that doesn’t make any sense, I told myself. You’re getting paranoid in this heat, going crazy.
I pushed on, one booted foot in front of the other. Wasn’t making footprints, though; hot though it may be, the surface of Venus is solid rock. At least it is here. Solid and scorching hot. Over on the nightside, from what I’d heard, you can see the ground glowing red-hot.
“. . . get through?” crackled in my earphones. “Do you copy?”
“I hear you!” I shouted, my throat so dry that my voice cracked. The storm, the electrical interference, must have ended. Or moved off.
Nothing but hissing static came through. Then the director’s voice, “. . . signal’s weak . . .up gain?” His message was breaking up. There was still a lot of interference between the orbiter and me.
“Am I on the right track?” I asked. “According to my radar plot I’m still five klicks from the ship. Please confirm.”
Hal’s voice crackled in my earphones, “. . . enera five! Great video, pal!”
Terrific. The video got through but our voice link is chopped up all to hell and back.
Then it hit me. If the video link is working, switch the voice communications to that channel. I told them what I was doing while I made the change on the comm panel.
“Can you hear me better now?” I asked, my voice still cracked and dry as dehydrated dust.
No answer. Crap, I thought, it isn’t working.
Then, “We hear you. Weak but clear. Are you okay?”
I can’t tell you how much better I felt with a solid link back to the orbiter. It didn’t really change things. I was just as tired and hot and far from safety as before. But I wasn’t alone anymore.
“According to the signals from your beacon and the return vehicle’s,” the director said, as calmly professional as ever, “you are less than five klicks from the ship.”
“Five klicks, copy.”
“That distance holds good if t
here’s no atmospheric distortions warping the signals,” he added.
“Thanks a lot,” I groused.
Hal came on again and talked to me nonstop, trying to buck me up, keep me going. At first I wondered why he was doing the pep-talk routine, then I realized that I must be dragging along pretty damned slowly. I put my life-support graph on the helmet screen. Yeah, air was low, water lower, and I was almost out of the heat-absorbing alloy.
I turned around three-sixty degrees and saw the ragged trail of molten alloy I was leaving behind me, like a robot with diarrhea. The alloy was shiny, new-looking against the cracked, worn, old rocks. And there were lines curving along the ground, converging on the trail every few meters.
Snakes! I realized. They like metals. I turned back toward the distant rescue vehicle and made tracks as fast as I could.
Which wasn’t all that fast. Inside the cumbersome suit I felt like Frankenstein’s monster trying to play basketball, lumbering along, painfully slow.
I must have been describing all this into my helmet mike, talking nonstop. Hal kept talking, too.
And then the servo on my right knee seized up. The knee just froze, half bent, and I toppled over on my face with a thump that whacked my nose against the helmet’s faceplate. Good thing, in a way. The pain kept me from blacking out. Blood spattered over my readout screens and the lower half of the faceplate. I must’ve screamed every obscenity I’d ever heard.
Hal and the controller were both yelling at me at once. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
Through the pain of my broken nose I told them while I tried to get back on my feet. No go. My right leg was frozen in the half-bent position; there was no way I could walk. Blood was gushing down my throat.
So I crawled. Coughing, choking on my own blood, I crawled on my hands and knees, scraping along the blazing hot rocks with those damned snakes slithering behind me, feasting on the metal alloy trail I was leaving.
The radio crapped out again. Nothing but mumbles and hisses, with an occasional crackle so loud that I figured it must be from lightning. I couldn’t look up to see if the clouds were flickering with light, but I saw a strange, sullen glow off on the horizon to my left.
“. . . volcano . . .” came through the earphones.
Just what I needed. A volcanic eruption. It was too far away to be a direct threat, but in that undersea-thick atmosphere down on Venus’s surface, volcanic eruptions can cause something like tidal waves, huge pressure waves that can push giant boulders for hundreds of kilometers.
Or knock over a flimsy rocket vehicle that’s sitting on the plain waiting for me to reach it.
I’m not going to make it, I told myself.
“The hell you’re not!” Hal snapped. I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the words out loud.
“I can’t go much farther,” I said, glad that at least the radio link was back. “Running out of air, water, everything . . .”
“Hang tight, pal,” he insisted. “Don’t give up.”
I muttered something about snake food. I rolled over on my side, completely exhausted, and saw that the snakes were gobbling up my alloy trail, getting closer to the source of the metal—me—all the time.
And then suddenly they all disappeared, reeled back into their holes so fast my eyes couldn’t follow it.
Why? What would make them—
I heard a roar. A high-pitched banshee wail, really. Looking up as far as I could through the bloodied faceplate, I saw the sweetest sight of my life. A squat, bullet-shaped chunk of metal with a cluster of jet pods hanging off its ass end and three spindly, awkward legs unfolding out of its sides.
The return vehicle settled gently on the rocks half a dozen meters in front of me and released its jet pods with an ungainly thump. I crawled over to it with the last bit of my strength. The airlock hatch popped open and I hauled myself up into it.
The airlock was about as big as a shoe box but I tucked myself inside and leaned on the stud that closed the hatch and sealed it. I just sat there in that tight little metal cubbyhole and gasped into my helmet mike, “Take me up.”
The acceleration from the booster rockets knocked me unconscious.
When I came to, I was on an air-cushion mattress in the orbiter’s tiny infirmary. My face was completely bandaged except for holes for my eyes and mouth. They must have pumped enough painkillers in me to pacify the whole subcontinent of India. I felt somewhere between numb and floating.
Hal was there at my beside. And Angel.
They had flown the return vehicle to me, of course, once they got a good fix on my position. The little ship’s cameras even got a good shot of the erupting volcano as it lifted up through the atmosphere—ahead of the pressure wave, thank goodness—and carried me safely to orbit.
“You did a great job, pal,” Hunky Hal said, smiling his megawatt smile at me.
“We were so frightened,” Angel said. “When the radio link went dead we thought . . .”
“Me, too,” I whispered. My voice wasn’t up to anything more.
“We’ll get an Oscar for this one,” Hal said. “For sure.”
For sure.
“Get some rest now,” he went on. “I’ve gotta get over to the processing guys and see how they’re morphing your video imagery.”
I nodded. Angel looked down at me, sweet as her namesake, then turned to Hal. He slid an arm around her waist and together they left me lying there in the infirmary.
Lovers. I felt my heart break. Everything I’d done, all that I’d gone through, and it didn’t help at all. He wanted her now.
And I still loved him so.
Lars Fuchs, the pivotal character in the Asteroid Wars, first appeared in the novel Venus. In a sense, I’ve been writing his biography backward, starting at the end in Venus and then going to the beginning in The Precipice and the following novels of the Asteroid Wars.
When I began to think about doing a novel set on the planet Venus, the first question that had to be answered was: Who would be foolish enough to want to go to the surface of Venus? Certainly scientists are interested in the planet, but they can study it with robotic orbiting spacecraft and landers. They could even establish research stations in orbit around Venus, if they so desired. (And they will, eventually.) But send people to the surface? You’d have to be insane!
Well, the most interesting characters in fiction are pretty close to being insane, one way or another. I thought that perhaps a few danger freaks would get excited by the prospect of being the first human being to reach the hell-hot surface of Venus. And then a different thought struck me. Not a danger freak, but a coward. A weakling. A young man who must find his inner strength in the inhuman crucible of fire that is Earth’s “sister planet.” Or die.
Thus was born Van Humphries. In this story, adapted from the novel Venus, Van faces the first terrifying tests that Venus throws at him. But they are certainly not the last challenges he must face.
Incidentally, you will notice that Tómas Rodriguez, the astronaut we first met in “Red Sky at Morning,” appears in this story, too. As I write the interconnected novels of the Grand Tour, I find some characters appearing again and again. Lars Fuchs is a good example. Jamie Waterman, too. For minor characters such as Rodriguez, their appearances are usually not preplanned; when they show up it’s a surprise to me, a pleasant surprise, like meeting an old friend.
DEATH ON VENUS
My name is Van Humphries. I will be the first human being to reach the hell-hot surface of the planet Venus, or I will die in the attempt.
My father gave me no other choice.
All my life my father had looked down on me; despised me and my illness, sneeringly called me Runt. Sick from birth, I’d been born with a form of pernicious anemia because of my mother’s drug addiction. She had died giving birth to me, and my father blamed me for her death. He claimed she was the only woman he had ever truly loved, and I had killed her.
Father—Martin Humphries—lived in Selene City, on the Moon, wher
e he played his chosen role of interplanetary tycoon, megabillionaire, hell-raising, womanizing, ruthless corrupt giant of industry, founder and head of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.
My older brother, Alex, was the apple of Father’s eye. But three years ago, Alex was killed on the first human mission to Venus. His ship entered the clouds that totally cover our sister planet, but never came out again.
“It should’ve been you, Runt!” Father howled when we got the news. “It should’ve been you who died, not Alex.”
Father stewed in helpless fury for months, then suddenly announced that he would give a ten-billion-dollar prize to whoever returned Alex’s remains to him.
Ten billion dollars! I would have thought that half the world would leap at the chance to claim the prize. But then I realized that no one in his right mind would dare to try.
As beautiful as Venus appears in our skies, the planet itself is the most hellish place in the solar system. The ground is hot enough to melt aluminum. The air pressure is so high it has crushed spacecraft landers as if they were flimsy cardboard cartons. The sky is perpetually covered from pole to pole with clouds of sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is a choking mixture of carbon dioxide and sulfurous gases.
But Martin Humphries wanted his son’s remains returned to him. So he offered his ten-billion-dollar prize.
And he did one other thing. He cut off my stipend, as of my twenty-fifth birthday. On that date I became penniless.
I had loved Alex, the big brother who’d protected me as best as he could from Father’s cruel disdain. I decided that I would go to Venus and find his remains.
If I was successful, I would be financially secure and independent of Father for the rest of my life.
If I failed, I would join Alex on the red-hot surface of Venus.
I was not the only desperate one aiming for the prize money, I discovered. Lars Fuchs, a “rock rat” from the Asteroid Belt, was also on his way to Venus. From what Father told me, Fuchs was a monster. I had never seen my father look so disturbed about anyone. My father hated Lars Fuchs, that was apparent. He was also quite clearly afraid of him.